Most manufacturing industry facilities measure energy performance against specific energy usage goals, e.g., the steam usage per unit of production. These goals fail to account for the complex inter-dependence of varying departmental production rates and the prevailing ambient conditions. Traditionally the goals are set by the facility's best performance on an ideal day or last year's average with a fixed percent target reduction. Therefore, whenever some parts of the facility are shut down or the production is slowed back or ambient conditions change, the specific performance measurement does not yield a meaningful comparison. If a process change is introduced, it is difficult to detect the facility wide impact of that change.
Creep in energy consumption is only detected long after the event, typically the first indication is in the month end accounting reports that are normally issued 1 to 4 weeks after the month closing. Most often the costs and usages in these accounting reports are assigned somewhat arbitrarily on per unit values that are many years old and subsequently adjusted to compensate for unaccounted consumption, biases for allocations, etc. Tedious analysis of the accounting reports and operating logs are required to identify the cause of the deviation. Often with these long time lags the causes cannot be identified with a reasonable level of confidence.
Accordingly a need exists for a convenient method of providing easily accessible, automatically updating, energy targeting and monitoring system of actual values versus targets derived from current department production rates and ambient conditions, with real-time indication of which control settings to change to improve energy performance.